Authors: Patrick Lee
Ghost Country (5 page)
“It’s a blockade,” Travis said. “No one’s going in or out of there.”
Bethany nodded again. “President Currey probably ordered it within an hour or so after the hit on the motorcade, once he decided to go all in. I must’ve gotten away by a margin of minutes.”
T
hey fell into a silence for the next half hour. They listened to the whine of the engines and the soft tones of the avionics up front. Bethany stared out the window. Travis stared ahead at nothing and thought of the power that was arrayed against them.
Bethany turned to him. “Can I ask you something personal?”
“Sure.”
“Why did you leave Tangent?”
Travis thought about it. He thought of how complicated the answer to a simple question could be.
“Things would’ve gone bad if I’d stayed,” he said. “Somewhere down the road.”
“What made you think that?”
“Something told me,” he said. The statement was more literal than it sounded.
“If we get through all this, maybe you’ll feel better. Maybe you’ll feel like coming back.”
“I’m never coming back. If we’re alive when this is over, I’ll set up another identity like Rob Pullman, and find another warehouse to work third shift in for the rest of my life.”
“You do realize you could make it easier on yourself. As long as you’re creating an ID from scratch, you could give yourself a few million dollars. You wouldn’t have to work at all.”
Travis shook his head. “Money is means. It’s better if I don’t have much. Better if I stay on the fringe. It’s the one way I can be sure things will be okay.”
She stared at him. It was clear she had no idea what he was talking about, but after a moment she let it go and looked out the window again.
T
hey landed at Dulles and took a cab into the city. Half an hour later they had the location. The survivors of the motorcade attack—whichever ones they were—were in a sixteen-story office building overlooking the traffic circle at M Street and Vermont Avenue. The building had reflective green-tinted glass. It had no corporate logo visible. Just an address in large black letters on its concrete foundation, right next to the main entrance on the east side.
The signal was coming from the ninth floor at the northeast corner, directly facing the traffic circle.
Travis and Bethany were sitting on a cafe patio on the far side of the circle, one hundred yards from the building. It was 7:30 in the morning and the city was alive and busy in the early light. Every surface glittered. It looked like it’d rained all night and only cleared in the last couple hours. The story of the motorcade attack was everywhere. There was a big LCD screen inside the cafe playing the aftermath footage on a loop. The subject dominated every conversation Travis could hear at the tables around them.
Bethany had her phone low in her lap, out of sight to others nearby. Travis watched her mouthing commands she was entering into it. He couldn’t make out any of them. Probably wouldn’t have understood them any better if he could see them typed on the screen.
After a minute she looked up at him. “Signal strength is pretty weak now. Fall-off is consistent with a living body gradually flushing the iodine through the kidneys and passing it out as urine. And once it’s in the sewers it’s way too dispersed to read.” She frowned. “This signal is also consistent with just one body. Paige is the only survivor.”
Travis nodded. He stared at the corner of the ninth floor. No way to see in. No way to tell if Paige could see out. Maybe it wasn’t even a window. Maybe the glass exterior concealed a brick-walled holding cell on that floor.
“So what exactly are we up against, here?” Travis said. “What do we know, right now? We know Paige and the others came to D.C. to meet with the president, and show him the entity. We know they trusted him, at that point. And we know that once they were attacked, they realized they’d been wrong about him—and that he’s part of this thing, whatever it is. Whatever she and the others were trying to learn about. And obviously, lots of other people are involved too. Including whoever controls this building.”
Bethany continued gazing at the structure. Travis did the same. They’d seen no one enter on foot through the street entrance yet. A number of cars had pulled off of Vermont into the narrow drive that separated the building from the one next to it—a building that had its own garage entrance at the front. That meant the cars going into the drive were entering the green building by some entrance at the rear. Most of the vehicles were town cars or SUVs with tinted windows in the back, professional drivers alone up front.
“Let’s see who owns the place,” Bethany said.
She went to work on her phone again. Travis watched screens of data, reflected in her glasses, flashing and changing every few seconds.
After a minute she frowned.
“It’s not federal property,” she said. “It’s not listed that way, at least. The district records have it as a corporate office structure, privately held. Built in 2006. No entry for a company name, or any shareholder’s name. Maybe it’s a defense contractor, or a civil-engineering firm, something like that.”
She stared at the building for a long moment, eyes narrowed.
“Can you get anything more on it?” Travis said.
“I have to, if we’re going to help Paige.” She looked at him. “Here’s what I’m thinking. If we wanted to get some help, like
official
help, it would have to be the FBI. There’s really no one else who can touch something this scale. But we’d need to be careful as hell. Whatever Paige and the others stumbled onto, whatever it is that the president is protecting, we have to assume that everyone he’s appointed is on the same page as him. And since Currey’s taken office he’s replaced both the attorney general and the FBI director. And who knows who
they’ve
fired and replaced since then. They’ve probably got all kinds of loyalists in the ranks by now. If we go in blind, we stand a good chance of just touching the same nerve Paige touched.”
“How far from blind can we get?” Travis said.
Bethany looked at her phone. “It depends on the connections I can make. Names to bank accounts. Other kinds of holdings, like real estate. Connections from those back to other names. Like that. If I could get a clear enough picture of who’s involved in this thing, it might tell us who’s
not
involved. It would make our guess a hell of a lot more educated, anyway. The problem is that none of the names we know right now will help us. Not the president. Not anyone in his cabinet. Their names won’t be on anything damning, I promise.” She looked at the building again. “What I need are names from inside there. Owners. Executives. Almost anyone. It’d give me a loose end to start with.”
She looked thoughtful. But not optimistic. Her eyebrows made a little shrug, up and down, and then she turned back to her phone.
“We’ll see,” she said, and went to work on it.
Travis said nothing for the next ten minutes. He left her to it. He stared at the high-rise and thought of how it would work if they could get the FBI’s cooperation. The bulk of the Hostage Rescue Team was right across the river at Quantico. Between them and whatever local police they felt like coordinating with, there could be a sea of armed law enforcement around the green-tinted building within a few hours, like rabid fans waiting for a pop star to come out of a hotel.
At which point Paige’s survival should be assured. The people holding her were corrupt and violent, but they weren’t stupid. If the game was absolutely up, then their focus would shift to securing high-priced lawyers and cutting deals with authorities, turning against one another in the process. They would have nothing to gain by killing Paige at that point, and they would have plenty to lose.
But
until
that point, she might as well be kneeling in her own grave. Her captors’ reasons for keeping her alive could evaporate any time. It was hard to imagine she had more than a few hours left. Maybe not even that. Travis felt a tremor in his hands on the tabletop. He made them into fists.
Bethany finished with the phone and set it in front of her.
“Nothing,” she said. She didn’t sound surprised. “Every transaction is routed through some middle pathway with a gap in it. Everything from the original construction costs to last month’s electric bill. It’s strange how it works, but a relatively small enterprise can actually have much better protection than a big international bank or a federal system like Social Security. Giant trillion-dollar organizations like that have to be widely accessible. It’s the whole point of their existence. They can be secured, but they can’t be secret.” She nodded at the high-rise. “A place like that
can
be secret. It can do its business without anyone knowing its name, or the identity of its CEO. And it does. The place is an information black hole. Someone very smart worked very hard to get it that way. Probably someone I’ve played tennis with.”
“Can you run the license plates of these vehicles we see going in?”
She shook her head. “I’ll try it, but it won’t work. They’ll all be registered to some service that doesn’t have to keep client names on file, or something close to that. There’ll be a gap in the dominoes somewhere, I’m sure of it. We could even rent a car and try to tail someone home tonight, but I’ll bet you a shiny half-dollar that these drivers are trained to go through shakes along their routes.”
Travis knew the term. A shake was any wide-open space, like an empty stadium parking lot or a fairground, that a driver could pass through in order to reveal a tailing vehicle. In the movies a smart hero could glance in his rearview mirror and spot a tail five cars back amid rush-hour traffic, even though the law of averages pretty much guaranteed that a few vehicles in the pack were following the same route just by chance. In real life, professional drivers used shakes.
Bethany rubbed her temples. She looked very tired. “In my old line of work there’s a term for this kind of setup. Have you ever heard of an oubliette?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“It’s a kind of prison cell.
Was
a kind of prison cell. In the middle ages. A cell with no bars, no walls, no door and no lock. The simplest kind was just a platform sticking out of a smooth castle wall a hundred feet above the ground. They lower you onto it from above, and there you are. Imprisoned by nothing but open air.” She nodded at the building. “That place is a kind of oubliette for information. It’s not that there are firewalls protecting its identity, or powerful encryption algorithms. I’m sure it’s got all that too, but what really protects it is just open space. All the paper trails leading in have just the right breaks in them. It’s the sort of thing you can only pull off if you have the right kinds of connections and a lot of money. Enough to bend the rules around yourself.”
Travis watched another SUV pull into the place. The driver looked like an NFL linebacker with a Marine haircut. Maybe he’d been both of those at one time.
“It’s not gonna happen with the FBI,” Bethany said. “Not if we don’t know who we’re dealing with.”
Travis nodded, his eyes still locked on the building.
“What about Tangent’s hubs?” he said. “Didn’t they have a couple dozen of those around the world? Secure sites staffed with their people, armed and trained to beat hell? Couldn’t we get help from one of those?”
Bethany was already shaking her head. “The hubs are gone. They only existed to deal with Aaron Pilgrim. Once that threat was eliminated, there was no more need for them. Hub staff were never really members of Tangent to begin with. They were elite military units from a number of countries, cleared for some minimal knowledge of Tangent and its operations. Over the past two years they’ve all been let go, with nice, thick nondisclosure documents to sign on their way out.”
She was looking down at her hands as she spoke. She looked about as lost as anyone Travis had ever seen.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “We’re not going to get any help, and we’re not getting in there by ourselves. You know that, don’t you?”
Travis stared at the place. If Paige’s room had a window, and if she could stand up and walk to it, she could see the two of them right now—even if she’d never recognize them at this range.
He looked away from the building. Met Bethany’s gaze.
“Yes,” he said. “I know. Every guard in the place will have an automatic weapon and a big red button that can lock the whole building down.”
“And we’re a kid armed with a slingshot.”
Travis’s eyes fell to Bethany’s backpack lying between them on the table, and the long cylindrical shape inside it.
“We don’t know what we’re armed with yet,” he said.
Bethany nodded. “Let’s find out.”
P
aige woke in the same place where she’d fallen asleep: a hardwood-floored office eight or ten stories up, overlooking D.C. through tinted windows. The room was bare. The windows stretched from floor to ceiling. She lay in the center of the open space, her wrists and ankles bound with heavy-duty zip ties.